There are, therefore, ample resources to help practitioners to improve their style. And yet, if you review at random the agreements published on Edgar, many or most of which are drafted by the country’s top law firms, you would wonder if the drafters had ever heard of, let alone considered, the issue.

It is certainly regrettable that the push is still on for plain language drafting, that so many lawyers still seem not to “get it”!

I would suggest that your guiding principle when drafting should always be to write for your reader. It is the businesspeople who will ultimately live with and use these documents who need to understand them. The large majority of your readers never went to law school and are not familiar with legal terms the way you are. If, when you draft, you keep those readers in mind, you will necessarily and inevitably draft in standard English.

These ideal readers of yours likely also read the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal (if not all three!). Read the business pages of those and similar publications to see, in practice, how complicated issues can be explained clearly for intelligent readers, and apply the same approach to your own drafting.

If you want some objective help, calculate the Flesch-Kincaid score of your document. The score tells you what U.S. grade school level is needed to read your text. There are several websites (such as this one) where you can paste your document and get the appropriate score. You should aim for a score no higher than 12.

To get a sense of how an “average” legal document would score, I searched Edgar asset purchase agreement, and rated my first hit, which is a relatively modest 52-page document. It received as score of 19, meaning that someone reading that document would need a four year undergraduate degree and three years of grad school to understand it properly! (This 89-page merger agreement scored 21.7, so for it, you’d need almost six years of grad school.) When I scored a New York Times Dealbook article entitled Where Finance and Technology Come Together, on the other hand, it scored 11.6.